Atari Punk Console

It seems Hack-A-Day’s resident snow bunny has run off to Utah and left me holding the proverbial bag. How could a heart broken hacker possibly console himself? How about the soothing sounds of the Atari Punk Console? Well… soothing is a subjective term, but the screaming, bleeping, fuzzy sound generated by this simple circuit is great. Since their first post on the Atari Punk Console circuit last fall, GetLoFi has collected many different examples of the circuit. It’s just a 556, a few caps, and pots so it lends itself easily to modification. The most recent post is built in an actual Atari mouse.

How about hollow-coring a book? find a small hardback book that has a lot of water damage to the pages, or is just booring and cut the center out of all the pages, then glue them all together so as to make the book a box. I am not advocating destroying a perfectly good book, a work of classic literature, or an old out of print book ;) but ‘saving money in 10 easy steps’ or something like that.

Question: can this circuit be used in conjunction with other musical devices, i.e. could I run my electric guitar in to this box, run it out to my amp, and get any kind of odd modulations to my guits sound (guitar, elec piano, anything?) I never got far in to building my own fx pedals, but it would be neat to have something that could add some fuzz, beeps and blips. Either way, I will be building one of these APCs, though I don’t want to waste a good project trying to run my guitar through it if thats a bad idea.